Writing is both the most meaningful and the most narcissistic of human undertakings. Or so says Pankaj Mishra in this month’s The Believer. His response to the question of how can you be a writer and still practice Buddhist non-attachment really hit home for me:

“But so much of writing is fed by vanity and the feeling that what you are doing is the most important thing in the world and it has not been done before and only you can do it. Without these feelings, many writers would not be able to write anything at all. If you think that what you are doing is not all that important in the larger scheme of things and that you’re just an insignificant creature in the whole wide world, which is full of six billion people, and that people are born and die everyday and it makes no difference to future generations what you write, and that writing and reading are increasingly irrelevant activites, you’d probably never get out of bed. You need to work yourself up into some kind of state every morning and believe that you are doing something terribly important upon which the future of literature, if not the world, depends. Buddhism tells you that this is just a foolish fantasy. So, I try not to think too much about Buddhism early in the morning. From noon on, I think about it.”